Several of my data-auditing scripts take a long time to execute. Until recently I had no way of knowing how long they'd take. I'd enter the command for the script, press Enter and wait. And wait. I've now discovered the pipeline viewer or pv command, which tracks the progress of my scripts. An…

Diablo II is usually a breeze to run on Linux, thanks to WINE and so often times you need no special tricks. However, if you're like me and experience a few glitches and washed out colours in the standard fullscreen mode, you have two options: run the game in windowed mode and go without…

Let's not beat around the bush, Layers of Fear is a horror title slash walking simulator that you'll probably either love or hate. Well actually, that's not totally true, because if you're like me, you'll find the game to be an enjoyable, fairly intelligent and psychological (also psychedelic)…

Back in March 2015 I blogged about a track-changes script that reports the edits made to a tab-separated data table. The script actually generates two reports: a plain text version and a fancy HTML version. A slightly improved version of that script is on my data-cleaning website here. The script…

If you're a gamer, you probably find your computer's default CPU scaling (usually the "balanced" or "powersave" setting) is more than sufficient the majority of the time, but just occasionally, a game will run at its best when the CPU is set to maximum frequency all the time,…

Each of the two file managers I use — Thunar and Xfe — allows me to open a terminal in a selected directory. In Thunar, I right-click on a directory and choose Open Terminal Here, and in Xfe I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + t. In both cases, though, the terminal window opens right on top of the fil…

So, way, way back in ancient times (well, May of this year) I wrote of a little distribution called Void Linux, which you can see here. Basically, I thought it was pretty swell. A few months on and nothing much has changed. And that is a good thing! It's been a while since I've posted anything on…

Microsoft has used two different starting points on the calendar for calculating dates in different versions of their Excel spreadsheet program. Really. Microsoft explains the difference here. One version used 1 January 1900 for serial day numbering, the other used 1 January 1904. Of course, up to…

In a 2-article series here on The Linux Rain last May (part 1 and part2) I described how I used AWK to clean up rainfall data for my home town in Tasmania. The result was a file called rain3 with rainfall totals for each of the 36525 days from 1 January 1916 to 31 December 2015: In this article I…

If you've ever wondered how to put your Linux machine to sleep from the command line, here's a quick tip how. Now, you may ask, why? Why, when one can just often browse to the shutdown menu or suspend icon in your favourite desktop environment and click with the mouse? Because we can! Plus, there's…

I often sort lists on the command line and get the frequencies of listed items with the command chain sort | uniq -c. For example, suppose I have a list of "brown" surnames in a file called demo: OK, so there are 7 Brauns in the list, 3 Brouns, and so on. But notice the indentation of…

Linux Links

Featured Linux Game Reviews

Yet another game in the porting lineup by Linux gaming heros, Feral Interactive, DiRT Rally is a racing game focussing on, you guessed it: rallying. As opposed to the largely arcade oriented DiRT Showdown released a few years prior, DiRT Rally is very much intended as a simulation, delivering…

Trigger Time is described as a story-driven, top-down 2D shooter with a gravity gun and physics puzzle elements with some cutscenes amongst the 9 levels of shoot-em up action. Amidst a world full of indie top-down shoot-em ups, does Trigger Time deliver enough to be different? Developer: Shephf…

The bullets screamed past Walker's ears, piercing the dust-ridden air. The only consolation of being aware of the sharp hot cracks through the air from the bullets whizzing by meant that he was still alive. His fellow Delta Force teammates, Lugo and Adams, were crouched nearby on the flanks behind…

3D platformer and Banjo-Kazooie fans rejoice - Yooka-Laylee recently landed for all major platforms, including our very own Linux. As a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie in particular, and created by a team made up of former Rare members, Yooka-Laylee has been a much hyped and anticipated game.…

Here at TLR we recently had a 'first impressions' look at the newly released game in the Hitman series of video games. It is also the debut for the Hitman series on Linux, thanks to the porting efforts of Linux and Mac porting company, Feral Interactive. Having racked up more hours of gameplay and…

Way back in early 2014 I reviewed Act 1 of Double Fine Productions's quirky and colourful adventure, Broken Age. Somewhere along the line I assume I was either hit in the head or started living under a rock (perhaps both), because it wasn't until very recently that I got to playing Act 2. I gave…

Times have been better, for Boyle Wolfbane. He and his unfortunate but loyal minions, along with his most faithful minion and pet, Fang, tried taking over the world like all of the best and most powerful dark lords do. Emphasis on 'tried', because Boyle failed. Miserably. Aveyond 4: Shadow of the…

Released on the 25th of August 2014, The Journey Down: Chapter Two is the second installment in The Journey Down video game series, a classic point and click adventure inspired by much-loved classic titles such as Grim Fandango. Described as having a "Afro-Caribbean vibe", a quick look at…

A sheltered, over-protected, bored boy in space. A girl in a fairytale style land who is thrust into becoming an offering to a giant sea monster. Talking trees. Hippy lumberjacks. Broken Age has it all. And then some. Broken Age (Act 1) is a point and click adventure game officially released by…

If you've never been a real sim game buff or especially never played a game the likes of the Euro Truck Simulator series, you would probably snicker or roll your eyes at the idea of driving trucks from A to B, often long hauls, being "fun". But you know, I once thought the same thing!…